Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Report: UK counter-terrorism plan Prevent is 'unjust', 'counterproductive'

Re: Demonisation

>Muslims and Islam have long been demonised;

No they haven't. They are just trying to cash in by undercutting traditional UK terrorism.

After nearly 500years of official source of religous scaremongering (having beaten out the Jews under Henry VIII) and 100 years of being official suppliers of terrorism to HM government it is appalling that a fear of native catholics is being replaced after a few bombs on buses.

I had to risk army patrols, car bombs and visits by NI ministers to get "IRA Killers" graffitedi on my catholic primary school. All kids have to do today is be brown on facebook.

1, He didn't say which Forces - he could have been in the Hitler youth or Franco's civil war army.

2,I'm not sure facebook actually verifies that he was official.

3, A totally harmless sporting gun. Assuming the sport is talking over bits of other countries

4, I suspect converted into non-automatic fire. Alternatively it could have been converted into a ball point pen by a particularly ingenious although rather confused 'Q'

5, He may have been confessing to war crimes

Microsoft tries, fails to crush 'gender bias' lawsuit brought by its own women engineers

> if you can't use peer and managerial review/input to decide promotions/rises.... how else do you decide who gets the up and who doesn't?

Algorithms, big-data, data-science.Then you can't be blamed for anything because it's SCIENCE.

ie you invent a bunch of meaningless metrics (lines of code, bugs closed, features implemented) which are then gamed by the same weasels who downrate women - but this time you cant complain because SCIENCE.

Re: Always a one-sided story

It also assumes the women you hired are averagely as good as the men you hired.

But - This isn't the same as saying are women aren't as good as men.

If the prestigious university CS depts you recruit from are 92% male and the small percentage of women are being grabbed by academic programs and your competitors who are all trying to make their own gender balance look better then you may have to look for more non-traditional candidates to increase the number of women. These might not perform as well

This is just statistics, nothing to do with women. If you were ordered to make your own company/group/football team 50% Welsh speaking by the end of the year then you might have difficulty filling those roles at the same level of qualification you normally demand. However good the Welsh are at IT/football. The long term solution would be to encourage more children to learn Welsh - but there isn't much your dept can do about that this quarter.

Mysterious algorithms, black-box AI recruiters are binning our résumés

Re: Not a new problem.

>there *may* be jobs for which one person is a plug-in replacement for another, interchangeable at a moment's notice, I'm struggling to think of many

HR ?

Sextortion on the internet: Our man refuses to lie down and take it

Re: Oh no! One of Vyvyan's socks has escaped!

Nena (of 99 red balloons) is hotter now than when I was a teenager - same thing doesn't seem to have happened to me.

If you were more famous the BBC could have sent it's helicopter....

Location boffins demo satellite-free navigation

Re: "AM/FM radio"

Managed a couple of feet in the 1980s (although it took a camper van full of electronics back then)

www.phy.cam.ac.uk/directory/duffettsmithp

Forget malware, crooks are cracking ATMs the old-fashioned way – with explosives

>Here in Switzerland .. a 200-franc note to pay for a single 3-franc item in a small supermarket

Normally shops are wary because it's a common way for crooks to launder counterfeit or stolen large notes.

In Switzerland I assume the equivalent would be for crooks to come in with a train load of Nazi gold to buy a 3-franc item.

Re: How to reduce the amount lost

>As stated damage to buildings usually would be more than the cash lost,

So the solution would be to make the machines out of plastic so that less explosive is needed and there is less damage to the building.

If you were to 3d print the machines you could probably get a silicon roundabout digital community catalyst innovation startup special unicorn not-at-all-a-grant to pay for them.

Or you could pack the front panels of the machines with 200lb of ball bearings and roofing nails to give the thieves a real surprise when they fill it with propane.

British jobs for British people: UK tech rejects PM May’s nativist hiring agenda

Re: Foreigners?

>"outsourced foreign workers",

We couldn't afford real foreign workers so we outsourced it to somebody in Gateshead who does the accents

Re: TLDR

Why shouldn't I hire foreigners?

I run a startup on the west coast - I have Brits, Russians, Saffas, Germans, Dutch, Israeli, 4 kinds of foreign chinese, Japanese, Indian, Africa, Iranian, Jordanian, 3 former bits of Yugoslavia, Chilean, both the "natural born citizens" are 1st gen Chinese. I just hired our first European-American.

They all have work permits, visas or citizenship, why should I care which? They all pay tax here, consume stuff here and contribute to the local economy - and most importantly build our business.

They are all also scientists and engineers and are all paid irrespective of skin color or nationality.

Why should I prefer people born here?

If it's purely racial then should I only hire white Americans, only Christians, only Protestants, only the same branch of the church as you or the same eye color ?

Re: Don't forget us oldsters!

The real problem with over 40s is that they don't think it's awesome to pull all-nighters and work weekends because a project is under resourced, poorly planned and has an unrealistic deadline

20 year olds will do that if you have table football

Re: This article is a load of leftie rubbish

I don't think we need to blow up the tunnel.

Just build an extra semi-circular section joining the two tunnels at one end.

I give you ... The euro-U-bend !

Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

>if we must remove ourselves from so much free movement of labour, those of us left will earn more as a result

But there will still be competition from all those other Brits driving down wages.

The obvious way to boost IT salaries is to reduce the number of tech graduates. If we close all the science and engineering depts except say Imperial and have a quota of say 20 graduates/year. Then those few graduates will see massive salary rises (although they may have to do a lot of overtime)

Social media flame wars to be illegal, says top Crown prosecutor

Re: And so, a whole new class of crime is created

>So we shouldn't create guidance on what is unacceptable and potentially criminal behaviour

No, we shouldn't use technical legislation to criminalise things which would otherwise be legal.

If it is OK to shout it on a street corner there shouldn't be a separate law making it illegal to shout over 4G. If it is already illegal to shout it on a street corner then we don't need a new law.

Re: And so, a whole new class of crime is created

And of course this law is only going to be used against people making terrorist or rape threats.

It will never be used to enforce injunctions covering up some MPs sex-life or dodgy business dealings.

It won't be used by a Korean cell phone maker to prevent concerns about their product being spread on social media and it won't be used by local councils to crack down on people who complain about roads.

Is there a latin phrase for all this that the lawyers can slip in ?

I can because I live in a terrorist state that started a bloody revolutionary war against being ruled by people like this and so have pretty near absolute freedom of speech.

Twitter yanks data feeding tube out of police surveillance biz

Re: Potential

How are we going to know where all the muslims/immigrants/PHP programmers are to round them up if we don't have the twitter data ?

You expect everyone to wear little colored badges?

(You might not like Trump's personality but his promise to crackdown on PHP is gaining him a lot of support)

Probe cops' Stingray phone masts, senators tell US comms watchdog

Re: Stingray Mk II

The current system does, but if it's used in a mobile location the backhaul to the "real" communications network is a mobile link. That's fine if you are eavesdropping on a single suspect but if you show up at a protest of a 100,000 people it's hard to channel all their call data into a single 4G link

Re: ... available to Americans of all backgrounds

It's a fight between the Federal (evil commie big government) Communications Commission and local (democratic state's right freedom loving) police

Don't panic, but a 'computer error' cut the brakes on a San Francisco bus this week

Re: Safe, huh?

The bus was perfectly safe - it was only the driver and passengers that were in any danger.

>What prevents a parked bus from rolling away when the battery goes flat?

That would be ridiculous.

It would be like leaving a train with hundreds of tank cars full of fuel oil parked on a hill above a town, with vacuum brakes that only operate while the engine is running, without any crew overnight and without a note telling the fire service not to use the engine kill switch when there is a minor fire.

Early indications show UK favouring 'hard Brexit', says expert

Re: Three things you can do about this Brexit nonsense

Write to my MP, my God I hadn't thought of that. Now everything will be sorted out.

If only this idea had occurred to somebody before

Re: The UK is now run by a female Donald Trump

Adam Smith was Scottish so it's perfectly reasonable for anyone in London to ignore him

Problem is .... WTO tarif rules don't cover financial services.

2 years after she triggers article 50 and no bank in London has any more right to trade in Europe than a bank in China or New York does. Think all those banks are going to stay in London for the weather and scenery ?

However much you hate bankers they are a big chunk of the UK's earnings

After baffling Falcon 9 rocket explosion, SpaceX screams: Hands off our probe!

And the NTSB was setup because previously the FAA was given the job of promoting air travel AND investigating crashes. So all crashes were one-off freak occurrences, or the dead crew's fault and never a flaw with the aircraft.

There was a recent investigation into the FAA inspectors being a little too 'patriotic' in supporting US aircraft manufacturers post 9/11 = you can't find faults with Boeing because we need Boeing military aircraft to support our boys in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Top interview: Dr Patrick McCarthy – boss of the world's future largest optical telescope

Re: "Mysterious Dr X says, Universe is NOT Expanding" at CanadaFreePress

If you add in the fact that the Big Bang was first proposed by a Belgian Catholic priest you can probably bring in the Da Vinci code, the Vatican and the secret order of Belgian Illuminati (slightly less famous than their Bavarian cousins but with better beer)

Re: E-ELT

>I like the part where they run out of sensible adjectives to describe the size of the next telescope.

It's a rare example of German irony.

The ESO (european but basically German) telescopes were named NTT (new technology) VLT (very large) and ELT (extremely large) the next one was proposed as OWL (overwhelmingly large)

While the British and American ones were named after famous scientists or donors.

Re: E-ELT

As an example of how insanely large the E-ELT will be

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Comparison_optical_telescope_primary_mirrors.svg

Re: Invention Time

You can for some applications.

There are CCD that can read at video frame rates with no noise, so you read the flickering shimmering image, chose the rare frames where everything was perfect and discard the rest - it's known as "lucky astronomy" but it doesn't work for very wide fields where one part of the image might be good while another area is bad, and you can't use it to feed other instruments like spectrographs.

A big difference between astronomy and camera image stabilisation is that with big mirrors there are dozens of separate patches in the image with different atmosphere and different image movements, with a camera you are cancelling out only movements of the entire camera.

Re: This is what's it all about!

That's the advantage of Chile over Hawaii.

You get less US government funding if you don't build in a senators back yard but you also get less opposition from groups using you as a political football.

Caltech (Carnegie's old enemy) chose Hawaii and are having big problems getting their telescope built.

Portsmouth bomb about to be detonated

Re: GB / US Bombs just as reliable

>They still find plenty of unexploded ordnance across Germany. ... transport them to special facilities where the stuff is all placed in a big hole and blown up with a satisfying kaboom.

Traditionally Belgium

Crypto guru Matt Green asks courts for DMCA force field so he can safely write a textbook

Re: Welcome to the land of the free!

If you want freedom of speech you should look to the founding fathers of the nation.

And start a bloody revolutionary war to destroy the current oppresive government.

User couldn't open documents or turn on PC, still asked for reference as IT expert

Re: Is it on?

Input verification with no error message is the most annoying and financial systems are the worst offenders:

Suppose on the next line he had entered 4.1% and it wouldn't let him continue because 4% is the maximum deduction for one legged piano players in Arkansas who also claim a single dependant as wife and sister and aren't separating form 24B from income on .......

Ladies in tech, have you considered not letting us know you're female?

Recognition of bias was the reason for the bind auditions - but it wasn't to counter sexism.

There was a belief that students at certain prestigious music schools or who trained with certain well known maestros were getting preferential treatment.

Women being as good as men came as a big surprise to everyone

That's cold: This is how our boss told us our jobs are at risk, staffers claim

Re: Witnessed something similar

Best story I heard, a bank was doing layoffs by the time-honored method of cancelling your access badge.

One techie turns up monday morning, badge does't open turnstile - thinks "oh shit" and goes home and starts updating linkedin.

2 days later manager calls and asks where the fsck are you?

I've been fired

No you haven't. Checks with HR and is a fault with your badge.

"Tough" says the somewhat pissed off engineer, I've got a job interview tomorrow - I'll be in next week.

Takes a couple of days off and goes back to a 20% pay rise.

US Labor Dept accuses CIA-backed Palantir of discriminating against Asian engineers

Ridiculous

They accept all members of the same Harvard fraternity that they went to, who are sons of members of the same fraternity and whose fathers are currently in the same country club - totally without considering skin color

SpaceX: Breach in liquid oxygen tank caused Falcon 9 fireball ... probably

Re: A few notes

and 1 cubic meter = 1000 litres and 4kg = 1000 x 4cc

Re: A few notes

4litres (= a milk jug) of LHe expands to 24 cubic meters (=an apartment) of room temperature/pressure gas. So blocked He pipework can get very exciting very quickly.

It's also why we aren't allowed to travel in elevators with the LHe dewers and why that glass internal wall along the side of the NMR lab is a REALLY stupid idea.

Re: too technical for me

The falcon9 holds nearly 120,000kg of Kerosene.

An AGA burns about 40litres of kerosene a week (according to their website), say 2000kg/year

The Gruniad has a readership of around 150,000.

So assuming that 100,000 Guardian readers have an AGA they burn 200,000 ton of Kerosene a year or nearly 1500 Falcon9 launches - I propose this as a new el'reg unit.

Pull the plug! PowerPoint may kill my conference audience

Re: Presentation methods

I would like to deliver this quarter's financials through the medium of interpretive dance.

British unis mull offshore EU campuses in post-Brexit vote panic

Come over to this side of the pond.

We like experts, we pay them, you don't have to work in the City to get paid above poverty wages.

You can even afford a house (San Francisco and Vancouver excepted)

Even if you have a Northern accent people can't tell and women still think it's cute.

Your boss won't be a chinless **beep** who got promoted because he went to the right school.

(You do have to get used to not being able to swear as much in the office.)

Re: Off-shoring, can they afford it?

> John Major opened up the doors he doubtless had good intentions of widening access to higher ed,

It was a great opportunity for some elite places. They had been facing competition from other universities since the 60s but now they got a huge marketing advantage.

Go to say Sussex or Newcastle and hope the HR dept know if those are "real" universities or just an old teacher training college rebranded. Much safer to stick with Oxbridge/London/Durham. Same thing applies to researchers/industry partners/funders as well as students.

If you were cynical you could think that it was all planned over a nice dinner for Sir Humphrey at his old college.

Re: french law

Open enrolement is a problem for many courses. You end up with massive first year classes with a 80% drop out rate. It's less a problem in science/engineering because you can set pre-req.

Staff is a bigger problem, jobs are civil service. So it's very very difficult for a new post-doc to get a permanent job, but once they do they are set for life and impossible to fire - makes for some pretty hide bound departments.

Microsoft cuts ribbon on Euro cloud bit barn for Office 365, Azure

Really it is a good thing.

If the 3letter agencies are after you then there is nothing this can do - but to stop an East Texas patent court demanding all Airbus's docs are handed over to Boeing it seems like a good solution.

US cities promise to crack down on police surveillance tech

I can see why they want to reduce Police surveilance

https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/police-accidentally-record-themselves-conspiring-fabricate-criminal-charges-against